Summary

1. Sprint review
Team Blue and Team Green presented the results of their work in Sprint 2:

Team Blue: Had their first hack day on June 6th. 8 developers joined in, and got their systems set up and started hacking. Most of the work focused on setting up the infrastructure for regression testing and refactoring the code. The main work is in getting people involved and taking ownership of the project.

to focus on face-to-face events such as hack days. We expect a good gathering for the hack day on June 21st.

All face-to-face meetings should have a work-focus so it isn’t just talking but actually working together.

To have a clear process for contributing code. When is code “done”? When it is ready for review? When it is deployed? We need to figure out which developers are in charge of the GitHub repository, reviewing and accepting pull requests and giving feedback.

Similarly, we would like to have a core group of developers who also have access to the hosted version of the system on Heroku so that the latest additions and changes can be deployed regularly.

We need more precise and concise communication about the goals and main features worked on, implemented and delivered each sprint.

Søren and Thomas from the project steering committee attended the meeting and gave their feedback on the priorities and functionality of the system.

2. communal dinner
We had a couple of nice salads – including roasted Eggplant. 🙂

3. Planning the upcoming hack day (Sunday 21st of June) and following the coming months
We spent some time adding more user stories on Pivotal Tracker to work on for the hack day on Saturday. The goal is to make the hack day a small sprint in its own right, beginning with a short introduction and sprint planning session, then hacking and finally a little review before celebrating the day’s work.

Following this hack day, the project will be on a summer holiday in July where people can work on their tasks. We’ll send out a doodle for the next hack day in August.

In August, we’ll also have a Green Team user research workshop with representatives from the food coops to give feedback and help develop mock-ups and user stories for the system.

Summary

1.Evaluation of the process so far
It’s been difficult to get people involved in the project so far. There are a lot of online tools to navigate, and not enough interaction yet. At first, we thought that volunteers would prefer to work on concrete tasks at home when it suited them, and that having too many in-person meetings would turn them off.
But based on our experiences with the first Hack Day on Saturday, June 6th, we have come to the conclusion that we need to focus on creating occasions for the teams to come together, work together and get to know one another. It’s the working and learning and talking together in-person that is central, and once people get involved, the online communication will follow.

So going forward, we will:

Organize more hack days, perhaps even setting up a day every other weekend where people can get together and work on their tasks.

Take more photos and show everybody the work being done and how much fun we’re having. 🙂

More activity on Slack

Advertise the project more widely and recruit more developers (this also requires settling on a name for the project, see below)

Make an effort to get in touch with all of the people who have expressed interest in the project so far. And ask them individually if they’re still interested and invite them for the next hack day.

Set up a group for the project on MeetUp.com to make it easier for interested developers and others already on that platform to join in.

Send out Calendar invitations to community members who prefer to receive meeting invites that way.

2. Backlog refinement and mockups
Marie-Louise has managed to get us a open source project license for the Balsamiq Mockups tool (see a video and their website). Get in touch with her on Slack to receive an invite and get started.

We discussed the “shifts and tasks” module of the system, and began sketching out a few mockups of the user dashboard, which Marie-Louise will synthesize into a few examples in Balsamiq. Andreas will send these mock-ups out to the various food coops for commentary and as a way to get more food coop members involved in the project.
We also found that working with sketches and mock-ups was a really good and concrete way to start discussion of a new Epic, and the related User Stories. For the coming hack days and backlog refinement meetings, we will focus a lot of the work of Green Team on producing mock-ups and using them as the basis for the development of User Stories for the Product Backlog.

3. Next hack day
We sent out a doodle to find the date for the next hack day. The result was unanimous: The next hack day will be Sunday the 21st of June at Socialsquare HQ, Vestergade 20C.
Both Blue Team and Green Team will be there, working on their respective tasks.

4. Project name
As the project grows, it is becoming more and more important to find a good name for it. “FoodNet” was never meant to be the real name of the project. It was just a descriptive title to put on the project grant application. So, we’ve been dancing around this for a while now, and it’s time to settle on a proper name for the project. Both in order to buy and set up a proper top-level domain name, but also to build an identity (logo, design, etc.) for the project.
Andreas has set up a poll with name suggestions. Cast your vote, or add your suggestion. Final decision will be made at the Hack Day on the 21st of June!

17.00 – 17.30 Sprint Review of Sprint 1– what have we produced this sprint?

Team Green:
Marie-Louise has visited one of the local departments of KBHFF to try the onboarding experience as a new member and see how the existing systems works in practice. She has written up her observations on Pivotal Tracker, and created a series of new user stories.

Team Blue:
Paweł presented the current version of the system, including the implementation of the user stories for administrator login and creation of new memberships. You can check out the system as it currently is set up here: http://socialsquare-foodnet.herokuapp.com/
(you can find login details on our #general Slack channel).

Paweł also presented the database structure as it is right now. See auto-generated map of database entities here. We need to make a standard definitions of the names of the entities in the database. This is a task for the coming sprint. It’s also been great to see how other developers from the Blue Team have done code reviews and helped improve and clarify the code base so far.

17.30 – 18.30 Sprint retrospective – How can we improve the way we work together based on our experiences in the past sprint?
– what was good this sprint?
– what was not that good?
– How can we improve?

Good:

Good to visit the local department of KBHFF

Good to see so many people interested in the project from the start.

Fun project to be part of.

Good to meet, to have an open and friendly dialogue and atmosphere between the teams about the development of the platform.

We still managed to deliver something, even though we didn’t have a clear set of user stories.

Slack has been working quite well. Pretty easy to use.

Not good

Even though many people are interested, few have actively engaged with the project so far

Speaking English may be a barrier when discussing complicated issues (for non-native speakers).

Difficult to understand the user story format, need more of an overview of what needs to be done and to understand the system in its entirety.

It’s a difficult to contribute because there hasn’t been enough concrete tasks to act on for the Green Team. The work method has been a little unfocused and undefined so far. It’s difficult to see where and how to start.

Maybe the current working processes are too complicated to get people involved. Too many different systems to use and follow (Not just Slack and Pivotal, but also GitHub, the project website and the wiki for meetings. And now we’ll also have the deployed product site).

Lack of connection between the user stories in Pivotal and the code base. Developers aren’t familiar with Pivotal, and prefer tickets in GitHub.

Not enough communication on Slack. Hopefully it will come as people get to know another the more they work together.

Improve

Once a user story is ready and prioritized for a given sprint, it should be created as a ticket in GitHub that developers can access and work on. All description and discussion regarding that user story should take place on Pivotal. Kræn will look into further integration between Github and Pivotal.

Socialsquare employees can do more to define concrete tasks that they can invite volunteer developers to help with and work on. To make it easier for volunteers to get started.

Meeting and working together more in-person. Hack-days where both Blue and Green Teams are present.

Better overview of how the project is progressing, and how you can contribute. For instance by using labels and tags in Pivotal. We will make an introduction to Pivotal at the hack-a-thon.

Create mock-ups to have a shared understanding of we want to build. For instance mapping mock-ups to the specific epics. Goal: To create mock-ups to be presented and talk about at the backlog refinement meetings.

Make more decisions to help define the product, remembering that we can always change decisions again later on as we learn more.

Improve project website to include wiki pages and meeting summaries. For instance by setting up a MediaWiki site for the project [Andreas will set this as a task]

19.00 – 20.30 Sprint planning
We defined and estimated new user stories for Sprint 2 for both Green and Blue Teams. Check the sprint backlog items on Pivotal and the tickets on GitHub (Kræn will add them ASAP). 🙂

Paweł is Socialsquare’s new full-stack programming developer, who will be working on the project, mainly contributing code approximately 30 hours per sprint, on behalf of Socialsquare. He has strong background in Python programming, thus an optimal candidate for the technology preliminary picked by the team for the first sprint. He will be part of Blue Team.

Marie-Louise is a service designer, working at Socialsquare, who will work in user research and concept development as part of the Green Team.

2. New project website
Andreas introduced the new website for the project with a summary of the background, organisation, teams and tools of the project. You can find it here. If you have any comments, questions or suggestions. Get in touch with him on Slack. We’ve also set up Slack so that interested developers can request an invitation and join in without having to send an email, hopefully lowering the barrier to get more people involved.

3. Introduction to Pivotal Tracker
Early use of Taiga as our tool for the product backlog has given some frustration. It doesn’t really fit with the process that we’re trying to follow. And there is a set of small UI bugs and other inconveniences. We picked initially because it was open source, and because we thought it would prohibitively expensive to use Pivotal Tracker, which Socialsquare usually uses. But we have found out that Pivotal Tracker is free for public open source projects. So we made the decision to switch from Taiga to Pivotal, starting as of now.
We know it’s a little confusing with all these new tools and platforms, but as we’re still in the initial phase, where few people have gotten started using Taiga, we thought it would be okay to do. We won’t introduce or change any more tools from now on, promise!

4. Backlog refinement
We spent some time going over the product backlog, defining and refining user stories for the Blue Team to work on. You can find these on Pivotal Tracker.

Furthermore, we talked about which research questions that Green Team should focus on in this and the coming sprint. We focused on two bigger questions:

What works well and what doesn’t work well with the existing membership solutions used by the food coops today?

What is the existing user experience for new members/users getting onboarded in the food coops today?

Martin and Marie-Louise will work with developing a series of more specific sub-questions for each of these research questions. And will plan a field trip to one of the departments of KBHFF this coming Wednesday the 13th. If you are interested in joining in or helping with this work, get in touch with them on Slack.

6. Upcoming meetings
For the past few meetings, we’ve tried finding the best time/date via doodle. But doodling the meeting dates doesn’t appear to increase participation. So from now on, we’re are settling on having project meetings every second Monday at 18.00 at Socialsquare HQ in Vestergade 20C.
Since we’re working with 4-week sprints, this will allow us to have meetings every two weeks with focus on Backlog Refinement and Sprint Review/Planning, alternately.

That means that:

On Monday May 18th we’ll have Sprint 1 Review and Sprint 2 Planning.

On Monday June 1st, we’ll have Backlog Refinement Meeting.

On Monday June 15th we’ll have Sprint 2 Review and Sprint 3 Planning.

And so forth (though, we’ll probably have to figure out something different for July)

1. Summary of results of the workshop on April 11th

Andreas has tried to sum up the results of the shared efforts of the team at the start-up workshop on April 11th. He presented a first draft for a vision for the project, and a set of core values to help guide the project:

One line description

FoodNet is an open source web application that provides simple and flexible infrastructure for organizing food coops and other local community-driven projects.

Vision

For food coops and other community-driven projects whose members want to coordinate shared resources, tasks and products, FoodNet is an open source web application that provides a simple and flexible infrastructure for organizing local communities.

Unlike other groupware such as Wiki, Google Docs, Facebook and Podio and other membership systems such as CiviCRM, FoodNet offers an integrated dashboard/toolbox that allows both members and administrators to participate and have an overview of their community.

FoodNet – Core values

We are committed to making the FoodNet platform:

1. Useful – This platform exists to support the needs of local communities. It should support these needs as effectively as possible.

2. Simple – visually appealing and easy to use and manage.

3. Flexible – Modular and scalable – easy for others to develop and adapt to their needs.

4. Sustainable – Reliable and easy to maintain.

5. Free – Both libre (open source, or free as in freedom) and gratis (free as in ‘free beer’)

Working together, we strive to be:

6. Open and transparent – our community is founded on democratic principles, and we strive to make it easy for everyone to participate, use and learn from the work we do.

7. Ambitious (and have fun!) – we want to have fun while changing the world!

8. Inclusive and respectful – our community is a user-friendly, learner-friendly and developer-friendly. It is a space for learning, where everybody feels comfortable to ask for help when they are unsure.

9. Realistic and effective – we don’t bite off more than we can chew. We take responsibility for the work we do, and when somebody leaves or disengages from the project, we expect that they do so in a way that minimises disruption to the project.

The people present didn’t have any objections to the draft, this will be what we’re basing the project on for now, developing and refining it as we go along.

We didn’t go into the name discussion again, but there is a long list of suggestions on Slack. Please add more of help qualify the ones already there. 🙂

2. Establishing activities for the sprint for Team Green and Team Blue, respectively

Facilitating Scrum

Observation and/or interviews in local KBHFF shops
Kim (primarily focusing on mobile use)
Maria (primarily focusing on new members of the coop)

Defining the product: Writing user stories, describing functionality, developing the concept
Maria
Kim
Andreas (will coordinate with Tine and the ØkoStartpakke project which will also be doing fieldwork in the food coops in the coming months)
Martin (Martin will write a frame for gathering user stories and invite other members of the Green Team to participate)

Team Blue (Building product)

Defining the product: Drafting on the logical model of the system
Thomas
Francesco
Mikkel
Sean
Martin

Implementing: Agreeing on the first take on technology stack (Voting about it, Coding challenge, )
Mikkel
Thomas
Francesco
Sean

Implementing: Coding
Francesco
Sean
Thomas
Mikkel

3. Getting aligned on the availability of people

Team Green
Maria: 2-4 hours three times a week.
Nana: Has a masters thesis coming up, so won’t be able to contribute much this sprint.
Kim: Remote work. No clear estimate.
Martin: 30 hours per sprint
Andreas: 4 hours per week coordinating with the food coops, ~5 hours a week on top of that as Product Owner and part of Team Green.

Team Blue
Thomas: 2-3 hours per week.
Mikkel: 15-20 hours per sprint (month)
Francesco: 1-2 evenings in the week, maybe half a day per weekend (in Italy the first two weeks)
Sean: 5-6 hours per week (unless it’s extremely fun)
Kræn: ~10 hours per sprint
Socialsquare programmer to join the team from next week: 30 hours per sprint

4. Introduction to the product backlog

Andreas walked the team through the product backlog as it is set up now in Taiga. We’ve only begun to unfold the first Epic focusing on Memberships. Both teams will add their tasks for the sprint to the backlog to get used to working with the tool and show the work they’re doing.

5. Planning the sprint (next four weeks)

For the blue team to start estimating the workload required of the various user stories, the team felt the need to become more concrete on the first take on what technology they would be working with for the first sprint. They choose to go through the survey submissions (to be published) from all the volunteer developers writing on the whiteboard what suggestions for frameworks and technology each of the respondees had.

A majority (4 votes over 5 frameworks / languages with one vote each) named the high-level Python Web framework Django as an interesting technology to pursue in sprint #1. The team agreed that this is in no means a final decision on technology – one voiced the need to decide if the team wanted to use any client side frameworks as-well (React was mentioned), but this will be up to the team to decide as they work their way through the sprints.

We’ll finish the sprint on Monday the 18th of May (following the long Kristi Himmelfart weekend). We’ll have a Sprint Review meeting followed by a Sprint Planning meeting for the upcoming sprint. And dinner in between! Agenda for the evening can be found here.

We’ll have a backlog refinement meeting in the first week of May. Kræn will send out a doodle so that we can agree on a date.

We will also have weekly check-ins (instead of the “Daily Scrum” meetings) – either synchronous on Skype or asynchronous on Slack. Kræn will set these up.

3. Design challenges
Martin gave an introduction to the design challenges for the project, and led the team in a group exercise to identify the vision for the project.You can find Martin’s presentation here.

That provides …
easy way to join and participate in a coop from .. to full member
from consumer to contributor
easy way to communicate and organise
easy way to manage secure payment / planning
usability
structured knowledge
ad hoc communication

Team Blue focuses on building the product based on the items on the product backlog

5. Core values for the project
Andreas led a workshop where the team sought to define the shared values and goals for the project. So that we all have a shared understanding of the kind project we are starting together.You can find Andreas’ presentation on core values here (at the end of the presentation).

The groups suggestions for core values for the projects were:

Group 1

Simple (Keep it simple, stupid!)

Flexible (A flexible product, a community that embraces flexible commitment)

Sustainable (easy to maintain)

Open (honest, transparent, Room for learning, considerate)

Easy to use

Effective

Fun

Group 2

Ambitious and fun

Inclusive and learner-friendly

Modular and scalable

Open community and platform

Transparent process and product

Group 3

Realistic

Democratic

Open and friendly

Both user-friendly and developer-friendly

Effective

Fun

Ambitious

Group 4

Free as in freedom (Open source)

Free as in beer

Democratic

Easy to use / “visually edible”

Useful / effective / supports actual needs

Respectful

6. Next Steps
Andreas, Christian, Kræn and Martin suggested the following next steps:

The whole team (Green and Blue) meets for a Sprint Planning meeting on Monday the 20th of April at 17.00 at Socialsquare HQ, Vestergade 20c to plan out Sprint 1. This includes defining tasks for both Team Green and Team Blue so that they can get started with their work.

Andreas will sum up the work from the workshop and write a first draft of a vision for the project and a set of core values to be presented at the Sprint Planning meeting.